Tax Day in America Underscores High Irony: Tens of Millions of Cannabis Consumers Want to Pay Taxes–Just Like Alcohol, Tobacco and Pharmaceutical Consumers

With all the bleak talk in America about the economy, including record fuel and medicine prices, one would think that elected policy makers and mainstream media would gravitate towards an obvious storyline on this day, April 15—America’s dreaded Tax Day—and that is the tens of millions of Americans who’d happily trade in the government-imposed label of ‘criminal’ for ‘sales taxpayer’.

1) Contact your state and federal representatives via NORML’s ‘Take Action’ center and tell them “I don’t think that cannabis should be illegal. Government should legally control cannabis through the same three-level controls the alcohol industry claims works for controlling a drug (alcohol) that is obviously more dangerous and deadly than cannabis products”:

2) Get educated on the tremendous economic expense of cannabis prohibition. Rather than tax and control cannabis, government instead arrests a cannabis consumer every 38 seconds (830,000 cannabis-only arrests in 2006) and eradicates hundreds of millions of domestic cannabis plants annually, accomplishing three perverse, taxpayer dollar-wasting outcomes:

-While government agencies eradicate hundreds of millions of cannabis plants annually, only a fraction are ‘marijuana’ proper and the government’s ‘kill’ rate is likely 5% at best. Meaning that 95% of the cannabis grown in the US finds its way from local farmer to consumer, including youth.

Of course a further and more tragic irony is that this is the day cannabis consumers’ income taxes are collected and thereby empowering misguided government bureaucrats and law enforcement to harass, arrest, prosecute and incarcerate them.

Doh!

Stop this insanity. Join NORML and its nationwide network of chapters in calling for the legal control of cannabis through taxation, rather than continuing with America’s self-evidently failing 70-year ‘experiment’ with cannabis prohibition.